If I Show You The Roses, Will You Follow?
by Boryskar
Summary: Something went damn wrong. Rhys woke up in the wilderness, wounded, all alone. He remembered the moment of opening the chest, but then what happened? Why did he end in this unfriendly place? What is the voice? And who will stand in his way, carrying the explanation of the whole incident, and the least expected truth? Because of cursing and further chapters, I rate T. Translation.
1. 01 - Give Me Your Loss And Your Sorrow

**_01 - Give me your loss and your sorrow_**

Consciousness returned to him slowly. He felt a dull headache, but was more crooked by the radiating right shoulder. He didn't have to open his eyes to know that his robot hand was completely shattered. Something was compressing the nerve connections in the place where the metal merged with his body.

There were tears in the man's eyes when he tried to get up. He couldn't, the pain made him stay in his present position. He tried to open his eyes. He had to wait a little longer... Perhaps it was a good thing, he said, when he was able to come up with a reasonably logical conclusion. He had the opportunity to think about what had to happen before he could regain consciousness in... a remote area. At least that's what he concluded. There was only silence around him. Even she was dead.

He was lying on cracked, dry ground. He felt the roughness of the substrate under the fingers of a real hand. It must have been a typical wasteland on Pandora, the most hostile to any newcomer on the planet. He could see through his eyelids that it must have been early morning or late evening. But who wouldn't lose track of time if they were unconscious for a long time? He felt that his esophagus was collecting stomach content, but he suffocated it. What happened...?

_Something went fucking wrong when we opened the mysterious chest from the Vault._

That thought made him open his two-colour eyes. It's not over yet, Rhys, he heard it in his head. Who was that? This voice could not belong to Jack, because he removed him from his subsystems together with the old ECHO-eye, the cybernetic arm and the unit in his head. He succeeded in replacing these components with models no longer manufactured by the nonexistent Hyperion. Now, however, his arm was quite badly damaged, while the ECHO interface did not want to run into his subconscious. It looked like his physical condition was affecting the improvements he had installed.

He tried to ignore the pain by turning his head to the left, to the right. Slowly, with a human hand, he took away the strands of hair flying into his eyes. Under normal circumstances, he would have regretted the fact that his hair was not styled in a customary manner. Now, he didn't have time for that. He remembered that something went damn wrong in the Vault when he was there with Fiona. They opened the chest, something flashed, and thus he found himself here, awakening the sore and damaged, not knowing exactly how to name his condition.

The mechanical limb didn't have the slightest desire to cooperate. It was heavy on him, when he tried to sit down on the ground. He held his arm with a human hand. Frayed cables protruded from it, sometimes there were no appropriate covers, plugs or fragments of metal, which constituted the casing of its limb. On his clothes there were visible cuts of smaller and larger sizes. He looked at himself, seeing his trouser legs torn on his knees. His shoes were in a slightly better condition. His whole jacket looked worse in shreds, his vest seemed a little less bad, but his shirt was missing two upper buttons. It no longer covered so tightly the blue tattoos on his chest that stretched to his left wrist.

_"Who was the voice?"_ From what he saw, he was completely alone in this place. He could feel the cold, unpleasant wind smelling him. He cried from the cold, trying to keep at least a little bit of the warmth of his body - but it was heavy. He had to go, find shelter, but where? Everywhere the same wilderness, cracked with dryness earth, and loneliness.

Rhys has never been so disturbed by the fact that he's alone. He was at the mercy of a planet that was never his home.

* * *

Hey! It's been over two years since I've been here - but I hope I can come back with new ideas, and above you can see the fruit of one of them, which I hope will be developed. As for the previous stories, they have been suspended for the time being, but I would like to bring them back to life. Keep your fingers crossed!

"Tales From The Borderland" and "Where The Wild Roses Grow" don't belong to me . To me belongs only time I devoted to this story, and the possible presence of OC, which I do not exclude :)


	2. 02 - To Have Someone To Go Home For

**_02 - To Have Someone To Go Home For_**

Rhys had the impression that the road he had chosen led nowhere. He didn't know how much he was wandering around. The only certainty seemed to be the fact that night had come. The faint light of Pandora's moon barely illuminated the surroundings of a tired man. He's had enough.

He was shivering from the cold. Weakness and headache signalled dehydration. The Heterochromic began to seriously doubt that he would survive until the desert sunrise, which was burning mercilessly. At that moment, however, he could consider it to be an exceptionally nice variety. Rhys wanted to feel a pleasant warmth on his skin at least for a moment. Anything.

Anybody.

The man inadvertently went to Fiona in his thoughts. The only thing he wanted to know at that moment was that there was nothing wrong with his beginner treasure hunter. He wanted to find her as soon as possible to take her into his own arms in order to make sure that everything would be all right.

And this was the moment when he realized that for some time he had been dreaming about living through successive stories, together with them, in search of mysterious crypts and their hidden treasures. Fiona stood out from the women Rhys has met so far. He wanted to share his happiness with her and take away her sorrows.

In the distance, the lights of the torches dripped him. There were enough of them to make heterochromic think he had a small town in front of him. Certainly they were taken over by Psycho or bandits,but he did not care about it. There must have been food in there. He must have had the strength to find her.

_Will you follow?_

It took Rhys about two hours to get to the town alone - it would have been possible to reduce the time to one hour if it had not been for his condition, during which he had to make stops more often than usual. To make matters worse, in his robotic arm somehow appeared the shotr circuit, the effects of which he felt quite painfully. He had to repair his limb as soon as possible to think about the way forward.

The town was extremely quiet, which made Rhys sharpen his dull senses. It is strange on Pandora if there are not at least two explosions within a minute, as he has heard from someone else. There were many indications that it could have been Sasha's words, but at that point Rhys really didn't have time to think about who could have been the author of that observation.

As carefully as he was allowed to do with a slightly unstable step, he tried to find out what was going on around him and what the possibilities were. Not a living soul, he said after a while. He wasn't particularly happy about that fact. He was limiting his chances of finding something fit for consumption. But how did the torches burn, then?

Someone has to be here, he thought, when he sat down against the wall of one of the buildings, between the container and the entrance door. He was tired... But he couldn't afford to sleep, that's what the subconscious told him. It could have been a bad idea. The dream meant even greater vulnerability, and Rhys had only one hand in good working order and lost his stun gun somewhere. He was afraid of even blinking his eyes. It couldn't end well, he knew it perfectly well. He's got to know the worst faces of Pandora. It wasn't safe here.

Suddenly he heard footsteps, something was coming towards him. Heartbeat's been harder. He pressed his back against the wall, pushing his knees towards himself. He did not know what to expect from the creature who could find him here, because he certainly did not provide any help.

"Daeva" someone said, maybe a man. The steps stopped and in a moment he heard them again, but more quietly. "What brings you here"

Rhys moved closer to the container when he concluded that the voice was coming from behind him. Who was Daeva? What were they doing here? Were they bandits? He slowly put his head up, making sure he didn't lean too far over. He didn't want to be detected by strangers. He choked a moan in his throat when the bruised body started to hurt again.

"Shy. As usual." he heard the male voice again. So Daeva was a woman? He only saw a man in the dim light, the woman was out of sight of Rhys. "Will I find out why you decided to pay me this unannounced visit?"

"I know my brother is on Pandora" said the woman. She must have been Daeva, Rhys doubted that there was another person among them. "And I don't think the presence of a stranger has escaped your attention, Amentes."

"You know me very well." laughed the stranger. He patted her on the shoulder, at least that's what he thought, not seeing exactly what was going on. "However, I must disappoint you, my dear. Such information costs a lot..."

How much did he talk about? Rhys's head is swarming with all sorts of scripts. What was supposed to be payment? Daeva did not have any bad intentions if she only wanted to find a member of her family - he began to wonder what could have made them separate? He knew that life used to write different, usually nasty, scenarios of such stories.

"Oh, please" answered the woman "You see the tits, and you immediately mean only one thing, while time is running out."

"That's right, Daeva." laughter again. Quite disgusting, Rhys spurred "Time flies... So how about finalizing our little deal?"

Such a sound could only be produced by the unveiled blade, it ran through the heterochromic thought when the man cried out in surprise. Suddenly, female silhouette appeared behind him and, from what he deduced, she held a knife by his throat.

"Do you know why they call me Daeva?" ske asked, maybe more snapped "When I lost my innocence, I became a shadow. One of those things that make you afraid to fall asleep at night. The last one that some people are given to see."

Rhys felt a shudder passing through his spine when, as he noticed, a rather low height, a young woman threw a man twice her size. He was genuinely afraid of what might have happened if he had stood in the place of Amentes.

"However, today I am extremely kind." continued her monologue, disappearing around the corner of the container again. "If you tell me anything that might lead me to my older brother's trail, and it is true, I will give you life. If you lie to me, I'll come back here. And what I'm about to do with your goddamn throat here and now will be much worse than you can imagine, Amentes."

_It creeps in like a thief in the night, without a sign, without a warning_  
_But we are ready and prepared to fight, raise up your swords, don't be afraid_

"Why are you asking me for help, child?"

In the morning, in a small room opposite the old lady sitting in a rocking chair, a young woman sat down. She looked twenty years old, but her eyes betrayed that she had seen more than the average twenty-year-old should have. Her gaze wasn't so sure anymore, it became more humble. However, she still stared relentlessly at the old lady as if she knew the answers to all her questions.

"Because I know that you are my last hope for finding my brother" she started quietly, dressing her thoughts in words galloping in her head. "I know he's here on Pandora... But..."

"However, you have doubts" an elderly woman allowed herself to throw in, gently tilting her head to the side. She had a nice, warm voice, with which she tried to encourage her guest to share her fears. "What are you afraid of, child?"

"I'm afraid he won't remember me because of time that separated us from each other" she finally said, sticking her eyes into her intertwined hands.

She felt the familiar cold on the skin of her right hand when a cybernetic, brightly blue clawed limb came into contact with the real one. It was not that she was expecting a clear answer to her question - which she would not despise, however - but that she was hoping for any clues.

"You know almost everything about everything, Grandma Sciante, that's why I'm begging you for help. My brother's the only thing left in the wilderness for me. I want to meet him at least.. and for a moment I feel like I'm not in this world.. alone."

"Ah, my dear." said Sciante after a while, getting up slowly from her rocking chair. "You see, you can search, but you don't know how to search."

A young woman suddenly felt her hand on her shoulder. She raised her head in surprise, seeing over herself a figure of a white-haired old lady with beer, emanating with calm and care at the same time eyes.

"Look for your brother as Katarina" Sciante said after a while. "As Katarina, who saw her brother disappear. Not as Daeva, whose empathy and care are strange to, but who sees only the goal to be achieved in front of her. Who has renounced her family ties, although I think it's the right thing to do. You're not that kind of person, my Katarina. Look for him with your heart, not with your senses that can be deceived."

* * *

"Tales From The Borderland", "War of Change" and "Where The Wild Roses Grow" don't belong to me . To me belongs only time I devoted to this story, and the OCs Daeva (Katarina) and Sciante.


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